Allan Massie is a Scottish writer who has published nearly 30 books, including a sequence of novels set in ancient Rome. His non-fiction works range from a study of Byron's travels to a celebration of Scottish rugby. He has been a political columnist for The Scotsman, The Sunday Times and The Daily Telegraph and writes a literary column for The Spectator.

What makes a classic of English literature?

Two hundred and fifty years ago, in 1762, the Chair of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres was established by royal appointment at the University of Edinburgh, the first Regius Professor being the Rev Hugh Blair. Edinburgh thus became the first university in the United Kingdom where it was possible to study English Literature.

Since 1919 the professor there has been responsible for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, established in memory of the publisher of that name, a partner in the firm of A & C Black. This is the oldest literary prize in the UK. For a long time it was in the sole gift of the professor, but now he is assisted by post-graduate students who help to draw up a shortlist and, if he chooses, by other members of his department. There are actually two prizes, one for a novel or work of fiction, the other for a biography, and, if the list of winners, reflecting the taste of the then Regius Professor, is a trifle quirky, it is generally pretty distinguished. The original endowment of the prize is now supplemented by the University, and, to mark the 250th anniversary of the establishment of the professorial chair, it has been decided to name the best of the prize-winning novels, and a shortlist has been published.

The six books on the shortlist are: The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene (1948); The Mandelbaum Gate by Muriel Spark (1965); Night at the Circus by Angela Carter (1983); A Disaffection by James Kelman (1989); Crossing The River by Caryl Phillips (1993); and The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2006).

Rather curiously, there is nothing from almost the first 30 years of the Prize’s history. Admittedly some of the early winners are now dated. I don’t suppose many now read David Garnett’s Lady into Fox (1922), Adam’s Breed by Radcliffe Hall (1926), or the 1929 winner and huge bestseller, J B Priestley’s The Good Companions. All the same the professor and his panel must surely have experienced some misgivings when they discarded such early winners as Arnold Bennett’s Riceyman Steps (1923), E M Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), Robert Graves’s I, Claudius (1934) and Winifred Holtby’s South Riding (1936). Other later winners to be disregarded include Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, Angus Wilson, John Banville, William Golding and Alan Hollinghurst.

Of course they are not attempting to name the best novel written in English since 1919. Their choice was restricted to books which have won this prize. There are very good novelists who never won it – Henry Green, Christopher Isherwood, Kingsley Amis and V S Naipaul, for example. Martin Amis too, but he did win the biography prize for his memoir, Experience (2000). Then the conditions of the prize, which require the book to have been published in Britain in the previous 12 months, may have excluded many American authors. Moreover, since no novelist may win the prize more than once, the winning book may not actually be the author’s best. I don’t, for example, think The Heart of the Matter Greene’s finest novel, or The Mandelbaum Gate Muriel Spark’s. Many of Alan Hollinghurst’s readers probably don’t think The Folding Star, which won in 1994, as good as either of his last two novels, The Line of Beauty and The Stranger’s Child.

Nevertheless, though all novels, like other works of art, date, and are read in a different way, regarded in a different light, and subjected to different sorts of appreciation over the generations, so that we don’t – and can’t – read Scott and Dickens with the fresh and surprised enthusiasm which their first readers experienced, we know that some books last while others don’t, retaining at best a period interest and charm. Those that last we call classics. For anyone who wants a definition of what constitutes a classic work of literature, I would recommend an essay by the Italian novelist, Italo Calvino. Entitled Why Read the Classics?, and published by Carcanet in a collection of essays with that title, it offers fourteen definitions, the last of which is: “A classic is a work which persists as background noise even when a present that is totally incompatible with it holds sway“. The whole essay is worth reading as a classic exposition of the meaning of the word “classic”.

As to the James Tait Black shortlist, my own would be completely different:

Arnold Bennett: Riceyman Steps; Joyce Cary: A House of Children; Evelyn Waugh: Men At Arms; Anthony Powell: At Lady Molly’s; Piers Paul Read: A Season In The West; and John Le Carré: The Honourable Schoolboy. As a lollipop I would add England, Their England, if only for the hilarious village cricket match. Interestingly, none of these, with the possible exception of At Lady Molly’s, is the author’s best novel. (Macdonnell’s is Lord and Masters, out of print for ages.) But they are the ones which won the James Tait Black prize.